Macmillan pressed the intercom button. ‘Jean, I’ve rescheduled my lunch with DCS Malloy for the same day and time next week.’
‘I’ll put it in the diary, Sir John. All right if I go to lunch?’
‘Of course.’
‘Don’t forget you have a recruitment meeting at two thirty.’
‘Ah, yes. Thanks, Jean.’
Macmillan got up and walked over to the window to look out at the rain while he thought about the meeting Jean had reminded him of. He’d been avoiding considering a replacement for Steven Dunbar until it was absolutely certain that he wouldn’t be returning, but sadly it seemed that that moment had come. Steven had twice turned down his overtures and still appeared adamant about not coming back. Macmillan knew why, of course, and understood Steven’s frustration at watching the guilty walk free so often — he hated it himself — but surely, through his anger, he must be able to see why no charges could have been brought at the end of his last investigation. It was just not in the national interest. He’d felt sure that Steven would come round eventually, as he’d always done in the past, but apparently not this time. He was now working as some kind of security consultant, living in Leicester. God, what a waste.
Sci-Med was Macmillan’s baby. He’d seen the need for a different sort of investigator in a high-tech world. True, the police had special squads, such as those that dealt with fraud and crime in the art world, but when it came to science and medicine they lacked expertise. It had taken him several years to persuade the government of the day to agree with him that such a unit was necessary, and that it should be independent, but in the end he had succeeded. It had now been operational for fifteen years.
There was no doubt it had been a success, as several governments had been forced to admit, although perhaps they would have liked Sci-Med to have been a little less independent on occasions where success had also brought embarrassment when the great and the good had been exposed as being rather less then either. As this embarrassment had not been confined to any one party, history had worked in Sci-Med’s favour, ensuring that any attempt by the rulers of the day to clip the unit’s wings would be vigorously opposed by Her Majesty’s Opposition, whoever happened to be in power. Macmillan had often pointed out that it was the opposition who kept Sci-Med in business, not the government.
Steven had been Macmillan’s top investigator, a doctor and a soldier with a proven record of being good at both, and he wouldn’t be easy to replace. Sir John had asked two of his other investigators, Scott Jamieson and Adam Dewar, to come in and help him assess possible candidates but he would be doing it with a heavy heart. Another course of action open to him would, of course, be… retirement. After all, he had the knighthood and had passed the sixty milestone where most senior career civil servants went off to grow roses and write their memoirs, but he couldn’t quite bear the thought of giving up the reins of Sci-Med just yet. It meant so much to him… if not his wife, it had to be said. She would be delighted to see him walk away from it all to spend more time with her. Given half a chance, she’d have him on some round-the-world cruise, dancing bloody rumbas with her blue-rinsed pals and listening to their bloody boring banker husbands telling him how they saw the crash coming all along. Jesus, he wasn’t dead yet.
The rain had stopped and the sky was brightening. He’d lost his appetite for lunch but he’d walk over to the club anyway if only to smell the wet grass in the park. Apart from that, something Charlie had said was niggling away at him. He’d mentioned that the dead woman was Lady Antonia Freeman. Macmillan felt that the name should mean something to him, but for the moment he couldn’t think why.
The meeting with Scott Jamieson and Adam Dewar was a relaxed affair, during which they narrowed down the list of potential candidates for Steven Dunbar’s replacement to three: two were medics, one a science graduate, all in their mid thirties. It was Macmillan’s practice never to recruit people who hadn’t yet proved themselves in other jobs, so new graduates were not considered. Both medics had served in Afghanistan with distinction. One was an A amp;E specialist, the other an orthopaedic surgeon. Both had been called into action through their association with the Territorial Army. Once derided as weekend soldiering, membership of the TA now meant almost certain active service overseas. The science graduate, with a first in biological sciences from Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh, had seen service in Iraq with the Military Police, where he had shown himself to be a more than competent investigator in uncovering a medical supplies scam.
‘Are you sure Steven won’t be coming back?’ Scott Jamieson asked.
‘I think his mind is made up.’
Dewar seemed almost embarrassed about saying what was on his mind. ‘You know, I’m not at all clear… why he left.’
‘Come to that, me neither,’ added Jamieson.
‘And I’m afraid I can’t tell you,’ said Macmillan. ‘Don’t take that personally. I would trust the pair of you with my life, but there are some things that the fewer people know about them the better, and Steven’s last assignment was most decidedly one of them.’
‘But as no court case was forthcoming at the end of it, we might guess that that was the reason?’ said Jamieson.
‘Let’s move on.’
‘Yes, boss.’ Jamieson smiled.
‘Check your diaries: let me know any dates that aren’t suitable and then I’ll ask Jean to send out invitations for interview. No hurry: sometime in the next few days.’
‘Still hoping?’ said Dewar.
As Macmillan was clearing his desk at the end of the day, he suddenly remembered why the name Antonia Freeman should mean something to him. Her husband had been Sir Martin Freeman, an eminent surgeon in his day. It was a long time ago, back in the early nineties, but he had died in the middle of an operation. He’d been operating on a woman who’d had a bad facial deformity from birth, attempting to give her a new face using a revolutionary new technique, when he’d collapsed and died in theatre.
There had been some other scandal surrounding the whole affair whose details he couldn’t remember, but what he did remember was thinking at the time that that was exactly the kind of situation that cried out for an organisation like Sci-Med. In the morning, he would ask Jean to see what she could come up with about the case. It might just be a trip down memory lane, but his widow had just got herself blown to bits in Paris. The niggle had gone; he felt a whole lot better.
The Black Dahlia Restaurant, Chelsea, London
A tall, elegant man sipped gin and tonic and thumbed through the wine list while he waited for the others to arrive. He’d chosen the restaurant because it had a small private dining room, ideal for the five of them. Officially they were the competitions committee of Redwood Park golf club, and he was the secretary, James Black. Unofficially, they weren’t, and he wasn’t.
Toby Langton was first to arrive, a slightly stooped man with an unruly crop of light brown hair, and clothing that suggested an academic, which he was. When he spoke it was in a languid drawl but with an underlying confidence that tended to present opinion as fact. Constance Carradine was next, a woman in her mid thirties, ‘power-dressed’ as expected of a prominent figure in the City of London. She wore a well-cut navy blue suit over a white blouse, and a pale blue chiffon scarf at her throat. Her dark hair was cropped short and she wore fashionable small-framed spectacles that only served to amplify an already piercing stare. Finally, Rupert Coutts and Elliot Soames came in together, having met in the car park. Both wore dark Savile Row business suits, individualised, in their minds at least, by the ties they wore: regimental for Soames, an ex-Guards officer who now headed an asset management group; university for Coutts, a top-level career civil servant.
‘Good to see you all,’ said Black after they’d ordered drinks. When they arrived, the waiter, dressed in black but wearing a white apron and looking as if he’d stepped out of a nineteenth-century French painting, asked if they would like to see menus.
‘Give us thirty minutes,’ replied Black, and the man left.
‘I haven’t seen anything in the papers,’ said Coutts.
‘Nor I,’ said Langton.
‘There was a small piece in the Independent,’ said Constance Carradine. ‘Suspected gas explosion in Paris suburb kills five.’
